and all that followed fell (like mercury to hell)
by Nazraana
Summary: "I trust you. No matter what happens, no matter what life or fate throws at us." AU! No pairing, just pure angst. fem!Harry. sort of side companion fic to "On the Road to Perdition".


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 **Disclaimer: Obviously I don't own the copyrights.**

 **Warning: One shot AU! Implied Major character death, OOC Fem!Harry, second POV, heavy angst.**

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 **Enjoy!**

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 _And all that followed fell (like mercury to hell)_

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You cannot remember it but you were born in the hot humid July heat, the dim golden light of the morning that will never again touch these colorful but sterile hospitals walls; you were born screaming and crying in earnest as your mother stared at you in wonder, stared at you in painful joy and felt life coming back to her, and yet with a strange pain, a void, something like rapture, in those years before everything, before desolation and war come tearing down their lives and the slow building up and breaking down of your country. You were born in the slick warm death days of the last Wizarding war and thrown head-first into a new one, and you did not die in the fire but you will die in the ice; finally, finally, you will die in the ice, after all this time, as you should have, as was owed to you; you will die, like they all did.

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When did your life become violence? It was not the war that it did it to you, not exactly; it was in the supposed home of your broken childhood when your uncle would grip you brutally till your skin bruise, in the cold disdainful glint of your aunt's eyes when she would ignore you, in the back alleys of Private Drive of strapping boys among them your own cousin, crushing their fists into your solar plexus, snapping your head back, your ears ringing, eyes out of focus as blood slid down your chin. When you were a child you did not understand what it was about you that made them want to do that to you – you did not understand, you could not; you used to curl up in your cupboard, coughing, sickly, and unbeknownst to you the death gods would look down at you, at your soul standing out starkly through the muddiness of the world, you, their child, their only child, and whisper, magic running through the world, that you were theirs and that they will come to you.

They will come for you.

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You are eleven when you first meet your best friends. Baby-cheeked and stars in their eyes, tiptoeing up the tender first steps of adolescence. They join you on board of the train and then, on the opening ceremony of Hogwarts, under the stars-splattered of the Great Hall's ceiling sprinkling your sweet, little heads with big, rose-colored dreams.

Afterwards -after the Troll's incident, which was a blessing in disguise that made you able to cement your friendship, now that you think about it- they can tell you have just started getting used to people, when they stay with you with habituated ease. A thought occurs to you then, that there's no need to look for in others what Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger gives to you on their very breath. You let the thought settle in you, let it stew in your head. You let it change you.

You are eleven years old the first time you make friends.

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You did not want violence but violence was in you, and soon enough you didn't have but a choice to let it all loose. You thought for so long that you would never be their savior, and then you became one, and now it is all that you are, and although you can remember the days before the war subsumed you, you cannot totally recover the feel of them, recover whatever it was it felt like to live in a mind that was not always calculating exit strategies, and possible threats, and potential casualties. You remember being a girl in a sickly scrawny body, remember the warm feel of your friends – _RonHermioneronhermio_ \- the feeling of Ron slinging his arm down around your shoulders, practically picking you up as he dragged you along, laughing; the feeling of Hermione close by wrapping her arm around yours and whispering softly, lovingly to you, but now it has been too long, long enough that you cannot really remember what it was like to be anything other than you are, which is a monster, more powerful than you ever should have been, tireless, almost invincible. But a monster nonetheless.

You would look at them sometimes – they looked so much smaller now, tired and empty. They looked vulnerable and the urge you had always had but which you had never been able to express – the ferocious animal urge to _protect them_ , to keep them _safe_ – hit you so hard you almost had to bend over, so hard you almost couldn't breathe.

"What?" Ron immediately asked, concerned. Even as Hermione would glance at you with worried eyes-

"Nothing," you said. "I'm here but I'm pretty hard to kill, or so they tell me." Reassuring them.

Hermione looked at you for a long time and then smiled a little, slowly, sadly. "It's easy to kill people out there," she told you, uncharacteristically of her. "You'll find out soon enough."

It was easy. You did find out.

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You wish, sometimes, deep in the darkest core of yourself, that it were easier for you to get hurt, for that, at least, it would be familiar; that, at least, would be the sharp stinging pain of sensation. Instead you are untouchable. Put on a pedestal, your wand clutched tightly in your hand and raining the heaven down on your enemies, and everyone is dead by your own hands through their enmity toward you or their betrayal to you, and the world is gone and born again, and you are a savior. You know nothing else.

You used to think, sometimes, when you were over there, during the war, about what being a fighter, no better than a soldier really, had done to your friends. Ron. Hermione. It had not suited them. The war had not been kind to anybody, but some of them could take it better than others, and your friends had put up a front, but they had not taken it well. They were off-kilter, out of sorts; you kept catching them looking at you askance, and that, of course, you discerned. But you didn't recognize it. Not at first. Not until the seeds of doubt had been entranced too deeply into them. Not until it was too late.

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After that it all starts blending together. You run, you camp, you fight. You and Hermione do your best to figure out where the Horcruxes are, but you don't have any more of an idea than the rest of you. People die, some friends some enemies, some you never knew. You don't mourn. You can't afford to take your attention from your goal. Ron, you know, uses the death of innocents to fuel him in battle. You use your hatred. You're not sure what Hermione uses. Her sense of duty, probably. When Neville and Luna join you after the failed battle of Hogwarts you consider asking why they still fight, but you don't. It seems somehow too personal, not when you hear their nightmares's screams at night, barely muffled and their pain almost become your own.

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You don't sleep much anymore. The boys learned to fall asleep in all conceivable places and positions – and some that you didn't believe were possible until you caught Ron or Neville– but you never mastered the art. Once it would have bothered you that they could do something you can't. These days you long for a time when that kind of jealousy would have made sense.

Instead of sleeping you spend your time reading, absorbing everything you can from the few books you've found, desperately cramming knowledge into your head as though a few books inhaled while on the run can ever hope to measure up to **his** decades of dedicated study. You still say **his** name, however. One of your last stands against him.

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Luna sits up with you sometimes, curled up next to you with her face pointed towards the stars. You sit in silence, one reading and the other dreaming. It's soothing, in a strange kind of way. You never would have thought that Luna of all people would bring you peace, but you accept it anyway. You learned long ago to stop questioning gifts. The universe offers too few these days.

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You don't hide your identities when you fight, don't sink to the same level as the death eaters. Their masks don't hide their fighting styles or mask their voices anyway, and you've learned to identify the most dangerous of them just by their walks. Lucius Malfoy glides; Bellatrix Lestrange either stalks or dances depending on her mood; Walden McNair stomps. **He** , of course, moves like a reptile, all snake-like grace and predatory speed. (Occasionally you wonder if Ginny moved the same way back when she was possessed during second year.) You wonder if maybe they just hide their faces out of habit or because **he** 's a traditionalist or whether their kills would haunt their mirros whenever they'd look. At the end of the day it doesn't matter. You have too many other things to worry about, too many books to read and spells to research and contingency plans to perfect to spend time wondering why death eaters do what they do.

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They fear you now, all of them, know you by your soft steps, your volatile magical signature even. In a strange way you feel flattered that you're a threat to them that they committed you to memory; none of them would give you the time of day if they a had a choice in the matter. It gives you a sense of grim satisfaction to know that you've forced your way into their closed minds so thoroughly. Of course it gives you even more satisfaction to defeat them, cursing them so thoroughly that they can't speak at all, can't breathe either. The ruthlessness you learned by yourself serves you well now and only Neville and Luna doesn't give you the occasional concerned look when you come out with something particularly obscure and vicious. Neville learned ruthlessness on his own. Luna adapts.

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You have long hair in your dreams. It's been over a year since you last had long hair in real life, and it's a year that feels like it's lasted centuries. You don't miss it, or you tell yourself you don't. Long hair's a liability in combat. It's one more thing to pull, to curse, to set on fire. You have a hard enough time staying clear of Unforgivables without an added handicap.

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You threw yourself into the fight at the beginning, cutting off your long hair with a single quick spell and refusing to think anything of it. There were things more important than your vanity. The fate of the world you knew rests on you; you could not afford to be a child any longer. These days you've lost that intensity. You fight, and you do it well, but you do it almost by rote. Fire this spell, dodge that curse, try your best to keep your friends alive for one more day. You think sometimes that you could do it in your sleep. You think sometimes that you already have.

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You slaughter Bellatrix Lestrange when you are eighteen years old, the same following night you lose your virginity as well.

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Luna asked what you would like to do after the war and you could not tell her because you did not know. You do not know. Back then (hardly any time ago, in the chronology of your life, and so many, many years of history) it did not really matter: you were all just trying to survive. What did you like to do, back then? All your pleasures were small. Hogwarts on warm days, the steady presence of your friends at your side through the crush of people in the halls, the soft glow of lights in the library – nights when your friends sat with you in a corner of the Griffindor Room and Ron would bring cheap firewhiskey and make snide comments about your enemies death eaters and slytherins alike, while Hermione would fondly look upon you both like it was the best thing that had happened to her, you giggled like kids, because that was what you were, really: you never stopped being kids, some part of yourselves, because you had grown up together, even when blood and carnage painted the world red and life was slightly but surely slithering away and everyone looking older than they should have, obsessively making strategies and plan a and b and c that never go anywhere-

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You grew into it together and now that you have lost each other, the war has taken the three of you over, run through you like a virus, and you wonder, now, whether maybe they were the only things keeping you good, human, normal – if you were ever any kind of normal. For you have killed so many, many men. And you think they have mostly been bad men. But you are sure that your best friends, somewhere deep in their now rotting six feet under the ground brains, haven't thought the same thing.

And sometimes you just really really miss them, despite everything.

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 **Author's note:**

 **M** an I slaved over this for two months and I barely reached 2k words. The good news is there's part II almost finished you should look forward, the bad news is I'm not gonna post it till we're much in deep in the main story. Part II contains plot devices (and Dumbledore, the MoD status and Voldemort's fate because whoever thought he's dead has been reading my story half-blind) that need to happen in OTRP for me to actually consider publishing it.

Anyways,

For those who don't know, you don't need to read "On The Road to Perdition" in order to understand the one shot. You can consider it as a stand alone of pure twisted angst. However, for those who read OTRP it doesn't change the fact that this is a side companion story. This is basically, the window to Reina's mind. A very small window, mind you. It will give you insight on some of her future decisions in the main story and explain the past ones.

Thank you for reading.

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